Liquid Sky (1982)

 

100 Best Science Fiction Movies from Slant Magazine

#91. Liquid Sky (1982)

 

 

 

Slava Tsukerman is one of those people with interesting, but mostly obscure careers. Born on Russia in 1940 he achieved some note for, in 1960, making the first Independent Short Film in Soviet history (except obviously it wasn’t, it was merely the first legal one) which was praised. He was a Jew in a Country where Jews were not completely welcome and he moved to Israel in 1973 where his TV Documentary work received praise, but not attention. Then he moved to the USA, specifically NYC, in 1976. Only six years later, he released this, the one film he’s famous for, which he co-Produced with his wife Nina V. Kerova (she had immigrated from Russia and then Israel with him), co-Wrote with Kerova and lead Actress Anne Carlisle and Directed. Kerova was already an experienced Production Designer and served that role here, managing the difficulties that the film was shot on-location and mostly illegally. Another Russian émigré and Tsuckerman’s childhood friend, Yuri Neyman, took over the responsibility of Cinematographer and the FX, and this proved a pretty FX-heavy film considering no one had the money to pay for that. The Costume and Production Designer was Marina Levikova, was yet another Russian émigré, and the clothes she created proved to be one of the things the film became most famous for.

 

The total budget was $500,000, and to put that in context, the notoriously low-budget “Night of the Living Dead” was shot for $600,000 in 1968.

 

Tsukerman has continued to work in film since, garnering more praise for his Documentaries and Narrative features, but like before this film, that praise did not draw much attention, and nothing that came after was even remotely similar to this one.

 

How does this feature, a true landmark in weirdness, fit in everything else he’s done? Well, I can’t help but thinking it reflects he own sense of alienation as he was approaching middle-age and trying to find a place for himself in his third (at minimum) society.

 

“Liquid Sky” concerns self-isolating, self-destructive, Sub-Culture that seems far-removed from Tsuskerman’s pre-NYC experience. The story evolved as two previous scripts were abandoned and Tsukerman came to realize that an extreme low-budget film all-but required relying on Actors he already knew essentially playing themselves. He’d hooked-up with a group of Acting Students he met through their Teacher, Bob Bradly, whom Tsukerman hired as Casting Director on an abandoned project that would’ve featured Andy Warhol in its Cast. Bradly would also become a Cast member.

 

A large part of the Cast and Crew landed-out living in the same building which would become the primary filming location, so basically, they had Cast, Characters, Crew, and Setting before they had a story.

 

“Liquid Sky” is filled with people who want to be famous but no one seems to be accomplishing anything, and there’s an Alien Invasion that almost no one notices. In retrospect, it’s also about how fleeting that moment in time was, and I suspect Tuskerman was aware of this. It’s largely set in a penthouse apartment with a magnificent view of the Empire State Building, home of two Artistic Types who were clearly economically marginal, the same type of people made famous in Tama Janowitz’s book, “Slaves of New York” (1987). Everyone must have known even then that if the film’s Aliens didn’t get them, the Real-World Real-Estate Developers soon would. (One of the film’s more famous locations, the Mudd Club, closed only two years after the film’s release, pushed out by Gentrification.)

 

Tuskerman’s film looks upon the young people populating NYC’s Punk/New Wave scene with fascination but also a complete lack of compassion. Their obsession with elaborate fashions and exotic make-up is clearly a disguise for their hollowness. The film has a notable body-count, at least six, so worthy of the then-popular Slasher films, but virtually all these deaths happen without consequences even though almost all have witnesses.

 

The title is a nickname for Heroin (apparently invented for the film, but caught on in the Real-World) and also hints of the SF elements. Two of the three main Characters are Addicts, the third is their Dealer, also the lover of one of the Addicts. The central player is Carlisle, then an unknown Actress but prominent Model, who plays two of those leads, a female and a male:

 

First is Margaret, one of the Addicts and, like Carlisle, an Actress and Model. Always wildly attired with stuff like a red corset with matching red-and-blond skunk hairdo, she describes herself as ''Truly as androgynous as David Bowie himself.'' She’s granted the most backstory, a WASP from a good family rebelling against a conventional life that someone else laid out for her, but now skimming just above Prostitution to support her Habit. During the course of the film, she’s emotionally abusive to some, far worse abused by others, raped twice, and has so internalized her rage the she seems unaffected by any of these experiences – that is until she starts believing she has a magical power of death. “I kill with my cunt,” she says, and she likes it. This film makes no mention of AIDS, while it was being made AIDS was barely entering the public consciousness, but it’s about Death through Sex and Heroin, so everyone saw that in the film after it’s release.

 

Carlisle’s other role is Jimmy, Margert’s main antagonist. Their dialogues are flawlessly executed both in terms of performance and Split-Screen techniques (even their shortest scenes together required three hours of shooting). He’s more androgynistic than Margaret and strikingly handsome. He’s also an Addict and more losery than Margaret, his clothes are expensive but he never has the cash for his Drugs so also a constant Beggar, and a rude one to boot.

 

Of Carlisle, Tsukerman said, “It’s all taken from her life. It’s very personal for her. One of the pluses of working with Anne—it excites her, to use her own life. There were moments where we were touching some really touchy subjects, but she never said no, she was always ready. It was not only an artistic project, but a self-analysis as well. We were shooting in this penthouse and she was living there. When we were finished shooting, she moved out immediately. She couldn’t stay there, it was too personal.”

 

Carlisle was highly praised for her dual-role, and work on significant Productions did follow, but only for a short period. Before the decade was over, she disappeared from the screen and became an Acting Teacher.

 

The third lead is Adrian, played by Paula E. Sheppard, Dealer to both, lover to Margaret, and a Performance Artist who dreams of moving to even-more-decadent Berlin. If possible, she more unsympathetic than the other two.

 

And that is the films one of the greatest distinctions, the lack of sympathetic leads. They’re compelling for sure, but deliberately unlikable. Wild sexual perversions unfold without nudity or eroticism. People are killed one-after-another and Tuskerman doesn’t want us to shed a tear. Margaret thinks she’s doing the killings, but she kidding herself. The Aliens are roommates she’s unaware of, they landed on her roof in a Flying Saucer the size of a backyard BBQ and are also Drug Addicts. As the German Alien Hunter Johann, played by Otto Von Wernherr, explains, the chemicals released in the Human brain during sexual orgasm are similar to Heroin, and the Aliens murderously extract them from Margaret’s partners during both consensual and non-consensual couplings. Margaret thinks she’s doing this, but in fact she’s simply immune from destruction because she’s so soul-dead she can’t orgasm.

 

Our Alien Hunter is the most likeable and funniest character and hopelessly out of his depth. He asks himself, ''How can I study the behavior of this creature if it's on private property?'' No one takes him very seriously, not even the attractive UFO Cultist Sylvia, played by Susan Doukas, who develops a sexual interest in him, but at least she lets him use her apartment for surveillance and orders him Chinese take-out.

 

It's a bone-dry and vicious Comedy. The only brightness to be found is its literal colors, white face-make-up with bright streaks slashing across (influenced by Patrick Nagel), exotic hair dyes, bold fabrics, neon light, and glowing twilight skies. We never see the Aliens, but often see though their eyes, their vison is created with low-budget but vivid, high-contrast, video effects (otherwise the film was shot in Super8). We see throbbing zones of red, purple, and green, just barely communicating the human forms before us. Then a circle appears on a person’s head, it expands, and when it pops, that person’s dead.

 

Margaret’s final confrontation with Jimmy begins with cruel tauntings before their friends (except no one has real friends in this World) cheering them on.

 

Jimmy hisses: ''Behind your back everybody laughs at you - they call you Chicken Woman.''

 

Margaret coos back, voice dripping with contempt: ''You're the most beautiful boy in the world.''

 

Margaret then sexually assaults Jimmy knowing full-well what will happen when her fellatio brings him off. As both Characters are played by the same person, the symbolism isn’t subtle. It’s a rape done as public spectacle and the Models, Photographers, and Hangers-on just keep hooting. When Jimmy disintegrates before their eyes (a sign of the Aliens’ growing power, previously they left bodies for Margaret and Adrian to ineffectually cope with) and no one intervenes. When another dies right in front of them moments later, again no one intervenes.

 

Tsukerman was blessed to have extra-ordinary talents to turn to, willing to work shockingly cheap. The accomplishment of this film is grounded on his friends in the Emigree Community and the kids Baker introduced him too. This can be said of almost any Filmmaker whose first successes were with low-budget productions, and if one looks up the Crew of Director John Carpenters first three features one is struck that they were all beginners and how many went on to remarkable careers. Tsukerman said of Neyman (but really everyone), “My job was to use his vision without losing the film’s objectives, to merge our visions together ... You see, one can’t just give orders to an artist. It’s difficult to inspire creativity and it’s easy to destroy it. Producers can’t just give orders to directors, and directors can’t just give orders to DPs, designers, and to all the other creative crew members.”

 

Tsukerman came to the film with a really solid grounding in what film had already done which was his foundation to try something new, so he does owe the Soviets a great debt for his education even if they treated him so wrongly in other ways. “I would recommend to any filmmaker, not just film directors, to study the history of cinema. A long time ago, I was a guest at Jay Leyda’s class on film history at NYU, and I was surprised by the fact that there were no film school students in the class. Leyda, this celebrated film historian who knew Eisenstein, explained to me that ‘future filmmakers’ do not care about film history.”

 

The legendary Sergei Eisenstein made the USSR’s two greatest Communist Propaganda films, “Battleship Potemkin” and “Strike” (both 1925), but increasingly ran afoul of Sectary General Joseph Stalin’s Censors as his career went on. His contribution was recognized only to the degree that he wasn’t Murdered or sent to Gulag like so many others, but he was dubiously incarcerated in a Mental Hospital for a time, regulated to Writing Curriculums after that, and after returning to Directing, found one of his best films, full of Nationalist themes, “Alexander Nevsky” (1932), pulled from theaters because it was inconvenient to the deal Stalin cut with Adolf Hitler. Two other projects, “¡Que viva México!” (during the 1930s) and “Ivan the Terrible: Part III” (during the 1950s) were pulled out of his hands late in Production and never completed.

 

Eisenstein was also one of the inventors of Formalism and one of the early Masters of Parallel Action and Montage, his influence can be seen in “Liquid Sky.” There’s also evidence of Russia’s Constructivist Avant-Garde in the Costume and Production Design, especially the very early Soviet Space Opera, Yakov Protazanov’s “Aelita” (1924).

 

NYC’s Punk/New Wave subcultures were built around music, but it’s mostly not sampled, probably because of budgetary reasons (I bet you that only five years earlier, Tsukerman could’ve gotten top Musical Artists in these Genres to donate their work for free). One piece that was sampled in the Club scenes was “Beautiful Bend” by Boris Midney, yet another Russian emigre

 

Instead, most of the compositions were original and performed on a Synthesizer which sounds primitive now, but were cutting edge back-in-the-day, the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument. It was a tremendously expensive piece of equipment but the Production got it second-hand and unreasonably cheap. But none of them had played before so they took a four-day, intensive Instructional Course to learn their way around it. It was given by Brenda Hutchinson who became part of the Crew. “So, one winter evening at 11 PM, after a day of cancellations because of a blizzard, in walk two people from Russia. They were bundled up and said a little snow couldn’t stop them and they were there for their Fairlight demo. It was Slava Tsukerman and Nina Kerova.”

 

The resulting score was wildly inventive and Composed by Tsukerman, Hutchinson, and Clive Smith, adapting Classical Compositions into something even weirder than Bebe and Louis Barron’s work on “Forbidden Planet” (1956) and it’s nicely cheeky in the midst of all the human misery.

 

The primary location was a marvel, and was essentially handed to them. They wanted a second location, another roof that provided a view of both Character Margert’s roof and the Empire State Building in the same frame for Johann’s surveillances, but that proved more problematic. They found one roof they wanted, but Producer Dino DeLaurentis had recently shot his extremely expensive by not very good version of “King Kong” (1976) and had offered that building’s Landlord a million dollars for its use, so that Landlord was no longer open to extreme-low-budget Filmmakers. Then they lucked-out into access to an apartment with a window facing the right way, and that became Character Sylvia’s residence.

 

The indoor shooting in the primary location violated most of the rules, they could’ve easily been arrested because of a Landlord complaint (they cut an illegal door to the outside) or the Fire Inspector (the tiny apartment was too small for cast and crew for the party scenes). One crew member was stationed in a hall on the floor below to do Lookout regarding these threats. It was not a well-thought-out plan given these were the days before cell phones; spotting a threat, the Lookout would have to then run to a payphone, call Kerova, but she might be responding from ten blocks away.

 

The film’s Investor fretted over them all being evicted before Primary Shooting was completed. Tsukerman assured him, “They will never throw us out because Nina is in charge.”

 

On one occasion, a Fire Inspector got into the apartment before Kerova arrived and then cut his head open on a dangerous prop (a Christmas Tree made of broken mirrors). Arriving, Kerova whispered to Tsukerman, “Keep shooting,” and took the bleeding Fire Inspector to another room where they, ahem, came to some form of arrangement. Her IMDb profile brags “She handled the production of the film practically single handedly with the smallest production crew in history.”

 

Other Production challenges concerned getting the film to look so good within budget. Tsukerman preferred filming the outdoor scenes during “Magic Hour” that short time just before sunset where the light is especially beautiful. “In order to get real mood, we’ll have to have magic hour from the beginning. In Moscow, magic hour is very long. In New York, it’s just three minutes. A real three minutes, maybe seven. But we were shooting three takes usually, changing light for every take because it was changing so fast ... it made our calendar twice as long.”

 

Cinematographer Neyman was born in IntaLag, Komi. It was established as Gulag (its full name, in English, is the Inta Corrective Labor Camp) for dissident Intellectuals during one of Sectary General Joseph Stalin’s brutal Purges. The Prison out-lived its purpose but was already a Community, so continued as a more conventional town, still baring the name of the Prison. It was also an accidental Intellectual hub that built an exceptionally good School-system for the children of the once-damned. With his solid Primary Education, Neyman was able to move on to top Schools in Russia as his education advanced, meeting Tsukerman along the way, both of them dreaming of escaping the USSR.

 

One of his influences was Maya Deren, yet another émigré from the USSR, this time Ukraine, and of an earlier generation. Her family was not oppressed by Communism, but targeted by their enemies, the White Russians, during the in the 1920s before the USSR had complete control of all the territories held by the murdered Czar. After Emigration, she became the most important Experimental Filmmaker in the USA during the 1940s-1950s. Neyman struck up a friendship with her widower, Alexander Hammmid, who gave him a remarkable gift, Deren’s old Debrie Parvo L, a French camera designed in 1908 that remained a favorite among Super8 Film-makers generations to come. Deren used that exact camera in her most famous film “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943). Neyman modified the camera to shoot in color. Neyman now teaches film and that camera sits in his office with the sign, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

 

“Liquid Sky” brought Neyman a great deal of attention, magazine profiles, an agent in Hollywood, etc, but it took a devil of a long time for it to provide him a career boost. It was his break-through film, but not until after securing the job as Cinematographer for “D.O.A.” (1988) was he blessed with steady employ.

 

Costume and Production Designer Levikova grew up in the same former-Prison as Neyman. During this film’s pre-Production she prowled Night Clubs with the others for research and became among the first Designers to drag the Punk/New Wave look into the Mainstream. The attention she brought to the Sub-Culture contributed to the look that would dominate MTV for the next decade. She pulled from early Punk’s DYI aesthetic but more expressed New Wave’s explosive color and layering created from Thrift Store cast-offs. The same parts of costumes were used over-and-over, rearranged into more and more radically new things, giving the impression that Margaret and others had impossibly large closets in those tiny apartments.

 

Levikova got the most immediate career boost from the film. Bloomingdale’s made a collection based on her designs and she became sought after for the Music Videos of David Bowie, Carly Simon, Nile Rodgers, etc. Rolling Stone and other magazines, as well as Fashion Houses, hired her as an Illustrator.

 

It’s a boldly original film that heavily references diverse debris of Culture. Classical Music, Bowie, Nagel, and Warhol (whose boyfriend was one of the Models but had no dialogue) are mentioned above. Also, our Pop-Culture memories of decadence of Weimar Germany heavily influenced the proceedings, and does Kabuki theater.

 

Watching, I kept thinking of the film “Rabid” (1977) featuring Porn-Actress Marilyn Chambers in a rare Mainstream film role and featured almost no nudity. That film concerns a woman accidently cursed with the ability to kill through affectionate hugs, it didn’t even require sex. As she enjoys the feeling and no one dies right in front of her, so she’s in denial of what she’s actually doing; as the film progresses and her denial crumbles, she’s horrified. Here, the dynamic is reversed: As the film progresses, Margaret becomes convinced she has a power she doesn’t have, and delights in believing she’s the Angel of Death.

 

Then, in the final scene, Margaret’s in a Wedding Dress, climbing a ladder to catch the Flying Saucer, a double-homage, both to the original “King Kong” (1933) climbing that Empire State Building in the near-distance, and the parody of “King Kong” during the last scenes of “Rock Horror Picture Show” (1975).

 

Critic Janet Maslin wrote, “The right audiences are bound to appreciate the originality displayed here, not to mention the color, rage, nonchalance, sly humor and ferocious fashion sense.”

 

Oh boy, did they appreciate. It was on Variety’s top-grossing film list for more than a year, and was in first-run for years more without the audience size thinning very much. The Sub-Culture it explored was growing and though the film was unkind to them, it was knowing and made them look really great. Since then, it had repeated, well-attended, revivals, the most recent I know of was 2018, more than thirty-years after its release.

 

The last scene of the film was deliberately ambiguous, Margaret wants to be taken away by the Aliens, and maybe she is, given a Transcendence after committing for many Sins for them. Or maybe, they just had her for one last snack before moving on.

 

The ambiguity seemed resolved in 2014 when Tsukerman and Carlisle announced that they were working on a sequel involving Margaret returning to Earth. He initially resisted the idea, “Liquid Sky” was so specifically about a time a place that has passed away, but that time and place seems to be increasingly relevant. Said Tsukerman, “Notice how many 80’s movies are getting remakes now?”

 

That film has yet to be realized.

 

Trailer:

LIQUID SKY TRAILER - YouTube